Archive for January 2013

In a Q & A with The Jewish Week, the Israeli film director who has just released “The Gatekeepers,” a documentary that consists of interviews with six men who formerly directed Israel’s Shin Bet, suggests that before long Jewish extremists could bring about the destruction of the self-defined “Jewish state.” According to Dror Moreh:

In Jewish history there is always the fight between the pragmatists and extremists. During the fall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem there were the pragmatists who said we should understand what the Romans want, and we should understand where we are geopolitically and what needs to be done. The extremists said, “No, we have to act.” At the end of the day the extremist point of view won and the result was 2,000 years of annihilation of almost all the Jewish society in Israel. We are, in my point of view, not far away from that now.

How so?

The ultra-Orthodox, ultra-religious, ultra-extreme right wing are controlling the government, are dictating to the government what needs to be done and not seeing the pragmatic view of what needs to be done in order to save the Jewish state as a Jewish state. If this continues, we will end up regrettably the way we did 2,000 years ago. I know that you cannot deduce from what happened in history to the future, but this is what I feel and this is what I feel also the heads of the Shin Bet are telling us.

Do you actually foresee the destruction of the Jewish state?

I cannot say those words openly. It’s hard for me to say that Israel would be destroyed — almost unbearable to say those words — but it is not going to go to a good place.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

In a must-read op-ed at Al Jazeera English, Belén Fernández reviews a new report by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) entitled “Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression.” Of the report that catalogues “the role of Israel’s government, its military, and related corporations and organisations in a global industry of violence and repression,” Fernández writes in part:

IJAN’s observation that Israel variously armed all three parties in Angola’s protracted civil war would seem to underscore the opportunistic nature of the Jewish state’s global contributions to violence – as would its collaboration in the state terror unleashed by the Argentine military junta in the 1970s, which incidentally disproportionately targeted Jewish residents of Argentina.

A similar theme was hinted at more recently in reports that an employee of Global CST – an Israeli private security company founded by the former head of the Operations Directorate of the Israeli army and contracted by the Colombian government to assist in the struggle against the anti-government Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other enemies – had sought to sell classified Colombian Defence Ministry documents to the FARC itself.

In 2011, it was alleged that Global CST had also marketed its services to both the armed forces of Georgia as well as to the country’s breakaway republic of Abhkazia.